Thoreau

I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky, our understanding more complrehensive and broader, like our plains, our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests, and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. ... Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

Thoreau, "Walking"

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living.

Thoreau

I have no time to read newspapers. If you live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire -- thinner than the paper on which it is printed -- then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember or be reminded of them.

Thoreau